Mercy
by Daemon hunter
Summary: Everyone has a back story, and some are less happy than others. Set Pre-The Next Doctor.


_Mercy_

_Summary:_ Everyone has a back story, and some are less happy than others. Set Pre-The Next Doctor.

_Author Notes:_ I hereby disclaim any ownership of Doctor Who and anything affiliated with it, and so on and so on. Before I begin, I must warn you about some nay-saying about the catholic church, as told from the character's opinion and not mine. If you're likely to be offended, you've been given prior warning. Oh and this isn't an overly happy story either, just in case.

Dear father,

'_Great men are not always wise'_ the bible says. But it should know, shouldn't it, written as it was by those great men of the past. What else do they say, these men? _'Do unto others as you would have done unto you.'_ _'Blessed are the meek, for they shall inherit the earth.'_ Clearly, the first of these three verses is self-prophesying.

Blessed are the meek… I'm afraid I know better. I know all too well, far too well. The meek will never inherit the earth, for they serve only one purpose: to be crushed, downtrodden by their betters, supposed or otherwise, utilized for as long as they have worth and then thrown away when all their value is exhausted. Do you remember me father, me and your meek little Mary? The girls in the corner, who's Sunday best was ragged and patched and frayed. I'm sure you didn't even notice our departure from Drogheda that cold, March morning. Why, I doubt you even remember us now.

It falls on me to inform you that your daughter is dead, father. Mary, bless her untainted soul, died a lonely death in a ship's cabin en voyage. I was there for her, and do you know what she told me on her deathbed? Her story, father, the miserable story that was her life, from her earliest memories to her last dawn. Her last wish was that you should know this, that I should commit to you in words that which might perhaps stir the faintest trace of care and regret in your bleak, negligent heart. That was all she wanted. Will you read and grant her final wish?

Mary and I have had a difficult life, her more than I, and for all our lives, self-proclaimed great men have living something of a hell. We both suffered, but it wasn't until off the coast of Wales that I realised the extent of what Mary had been through. She was only nineteen, yet every important man in her life betrayed her at some time or another. She was a very quiet girl, like a dormouse. You see, she had, like so many other unfortunate members of our sex, the notion in her head that because she was a woman, she didn't matter. Like a brave little girl, she braved abuse like I myself can nary imagine, and as for you, well, I doubt you could even begin to comprehend.

Three months before Mary and I left Drogheda, we all went to church. It was a year ago now, so such a short yet long time ago. Christmas Mass it was, and oh, for just that one day, we all looked ever so fine. With what pennies she'd been able to pinch from your study desk, mother bought Mary and I each a new frock, shimmering cotton of purest white. Mary fell in love with that frock, you know. She would never wear it, only stare at it for hours at a time because she didn't want to dirty or damage the fabric. I must confess, I was the same.

But that morning, we wore our new frocks and arranged our hair. We could've looked like cherubs if only we had garlands in our hair. Mother was truly resplendent, a woman more beautiful I have never seen and will never see again. My brothers, John, Thomas and Mark appeared ever so gentlemanly in their buttoned up waistcoats. Even you, father, even you made such an especial effort on that day. We walked together to St Peters Church on West Street as a family. It had been a cold winter. The Boyne was frozen over when we passed it by and the windows of the houses were frosted around the rim, as they were the frames to pictures of normal family life on Christmas Morning.

The service in itself was negligible and forgettable, because even on the day of peace on earth and good will to all men, God's word is unrelenting dross. It has been long since I cared for his doctrines. But what I do remember is what came after. As we walked out, united as a family, Mrs Thomas from down the road said something as we passed on by. You might not have even heard her, for she murmured it to one of her friends, not to us directly, but those words I shall never forget.

"Don't they look just the perfect family?" she said to her.

The perfect family? Oh, if only she knew. Because no-one knew, did they? No-one knew about what lay beneath the fragile façade of our family life, so weak it could be scratched away with the tip of a feather. Oh, mother tried so very hard to realize the ideal, and that I believe is what killed her in the end. Not your drink and not your fists, no, those only destroyed the husk of what remained. Her soul had already ascended, though to where I do not know. I suppose you did her a mercy really, putting her out of her misery like that, but Mary never saw it that way. She never could, such a child of ideals she was. Like mother, she tried to see the best in people, and like Mother, she began to die slowly, that very night in fact.

Her earliest memory, she told me, was one of pain. She was only four years old, but that didn't stop you from thrashing her to within an inch of her life. I remember I was there, we all were, forced to watch like some sort of theatrical audience. You wanted us there to see your authority in action. I don't remember what Mary had done, and neither did she, only the vivid imagery of the pain has lasted with us all this time. And when mother tried to intervene, well...

After that, Mary remembers… remembered you akin to a monster in the wardrobe, one who would hide in the shadows and when he chose to reveal himself, would bring with him only fear. It's funny to think that we were a family of providence, rich, middle-class descendents of a noble Scottish house, considering how often we would starve. Only Mary, mother and I though. Because you would feed your young, strapping boys with an allowance from the family fortune, whereas our food became gin money. Our frames emaciated, I remember Mary looking at herself naked in the mirror once. She was skin and bone and nothing more, like some sort of indigenous peasant from the colonies. She didn't relate that to me in the tale, perhaps having forgotten it, but I remembered. The horror of that image shall haunt me for the rest of my life.

But somehow, Mary and I survived, until we turned eleven. Our lives had been difficult, but I don't suppose we had it any worse than the average lower class family. You remember John, our oldest brother, I presume. He was your shining star, your greatest work, your favourite son, a soft spoken man with aspirations of grandeur you couldn't hope to match. It was so tragic that he fell under that train to Dublin on the day you two were going to see the bank manager. You probably remember him fondly as the perfect son.

Allow me to dispel those illusions.

Your precious son, aged seventeen when we were eleven, was little better than a common thug. No, before you ask, he wasn't a petty criminal, though he did run around in the Drogheda mob. Lest we forget, he was to be a university educated man, with a degree in law from Trinity College. I suppose that was so if he was ever found out, he'd be able to defend himself in court.

I don't know when it began, only that it did, and how it did. Do you recall whatever became of the daughter of Professor Humphries, young Isabelle, from a few streets away? She was the daughter of the man who was going to see John through university, a pretty young thing of about eighteen, quite the pretty ballet dancer. Your son must've taken a shine to Isabelle as soon as he saw her, for she was a very beautiful girl. Then one night, they found her body in an alley, dumped unceremoniously after having been strangled and her virtue having been destroyed. The Mystery of Isabelle Humphries they called it, for they never found her killer.

Guess what Mary saw through the Humphrey's front window on the way to the well one night.

Mary said the first thing that she heard was the sound of something breaking as she passed the house by, and you know how curious she was as a girl. She couldn't help but go up to the window and find out what the commotion was. And there she found your son strangling an innocent girl to death. He didn't notice, at first, at least until poor Isabelle had breathed her last, but as she backed away, something clattered to the ground behind her and their eyes met. She couldn't, or perhaps wouldn't, describe the intensity of it all, and in the end she ran, fearing a like fate.

For the next eight years, he ran a campaign of violence against Mary to ensure that she never spoke a word to the police. At first, he just made threats, promising to do the same to her as he did to Isabelle. It worked, and she never breathed a word of it to anyone, except for me. When the murder went unsolved and the case was closed, he didn't stop his campaign. Over time, it became more intense, graduating from threats alone to actual beatings. And after a time, he forgot Isabelle altogether, and beat poor Mary just because he could, because it gave him a thrill to crush the meek underfoot.

I wasn't the only one to know about the beatings. Thomas and Mark knew of it also, and though they did not share John's twisted tastes, neither did they try to quench them. They would never speak of it, my brothers, but they knew, and John lauded it over them, as if daring them to tell. I presume that was why Thomas took a lethal amount of opium in your study not long before I left. Do you know, I had no idea whatsoever that he even used the drug. There was no indication. And Mark, how tragic his case was, him and his wife butchered right in front of you by Highwaymen on the way to Galway just days after Christmas. Isn't it odd though how the swine didn't even bother to take any of their possessions?

Last year wasn't a good year for you, was it Father?

For six years, I watched the hope and flair go out of Mary's eyes and I felt what little I had of my own die with hers. But then she turned seventeen and everything changed. She met a man, a charmer he was, called Dermot O'Connell. He was a businessman and Mary met him running an errand at the family business, taken over by your younger brother when you decided alcoholism was a more fitting pursuit for your time. Despite what had been happening to her at home, she hadn't yet lost her faith in men. She was taken with him, I remember with a smile, and he with her. It was little surprise when the next day, he knocked on the door and asked it she would court him.

Of course, she accepted, taken by the man she and I both saw as the knight who would lead her out of the mire. Once, he took her to the opera house, to see Carmen I believe, and though she didn't understand the words, she came out crying because she was touched by something those Italian women were singing. She didn't know what, but she felt her heart rise for the first time in such a long while.

Your son John, being the animal that he was, naturally didn't take a shine to Dermot, but he was in the minority. The family welcomed him, except John, who must have begun to feel the hairs standing on the back of his neck, because though he was a bad man, he was also an intelligent one. Less interested was he in the preservation of his vice, but rather how his vice would wind up ruining him, as if was sure to do once Mary told him what went on behind closed doors.

I remember being pleased at the sight of his fear, though Mary wasn't. Because she wasn't at all vindictive. She hated John, most certainly, hated what he did to her, but she didn't take any pleasure in seeing him squirm, as I did. Instead, she lost herself in her revelry with Dermot, who would take her dining, dancing, walking, while trying not to think of what John would do to her when she got home. He reverted to threats for a time, knowing that awkward questions would be raised if sudden bruises appeared on her body. At the time, they shared a common trait: each was scared of the other.

Six months into Mary and Dermot's courtship, the charming businessman asked for her hand in marriage. He didn't even bother to ask you, because he, like everyone else in Drogheda, knew of your reputation. When she said yes, Mary did it not to go from one form of slavery into another, but because for the first time in her life, someone had offered her a choice. It was power like she had never before known. And how could she refuse such an offer from such a gallant gentleman?

They ran away to Dublin a month later, and when they returned, a silver band she wore around the third finger of her left hand. I went with them, because they needed a witness, and I was the only one she wanted there, apart from mother who couldn't come because you bound her on an iron leash. In St. Mary's chapel, on the outskirts of the capital, I witnessed her transcendence to a creature that had an almost otherworldly sense of joy about her. She was more beautiful then than I'd ever known her before.

But it didn't last. We returned to our familial home, with Dermot, and things changed, improved even. John could no longer touch her. We ate properly for one of the first times of our lives. Mother fared better and you fared worse. The shift of power was imperceptible to the ignorant outside world, but inside, it was like an earthquake had struck and rearranged everything into different places.

Then some money went missing from the family fortune. The first I heard of it was when John was trying to talk some sense into you, telling you what had occurred. But you didn't listen, for what was a little money (a hundred punts actually) when there was plenty more where that came from? Then another hundred went missing inexplicably, then another, then another, my brothers getting more and more agitated by it every time it happened, their inheritance disappearing down the drain.

Then it became apparent where the money was going, when a thousand went missing in a day. It was Dermot. You see, your alcoholism isn't the only thing that our family had a reputation for in the town. Our splendid wealth was commonly known of, so when a charming young businessman met the daughter of one of the richest, albeit vilest, men in town, well, he could hardly pass up the opportunity. He was enterprising, our Dermot, seeing opportunity where opportunity was to be found. So, of course, imagine his luck at not just getting a windfall, but a pretty wife to boot.

To this day, I am uncertain what his regards to Mary were. I don't know whether he did truly love her in the beginning, or if it was only the thought of gold sovereigns that he loved. Whichever was the case, it was immaterial, for John found out and he told Mary, don't you know. He probably enjoyed imparting the knowledge. Well, after that, it didn't matter what Dermot felt, because his intent had broken her already shattered heart. And that was when she listened to me properly for the first time, understood that when I said that there was no such thing as a trustworthy man, I spoke not just malice but the truth. And for that I feel regret and responsibility, for I must confess, I was instrumental in changing Mary's outlook on the world, and thus, helped to cause her death.

But what she did after that was of her own volition, without any influence from me or anyone else. Personally, I find love to be a very interesting emotion. Forgive me if this sounds like digression, but you shall understand soon enough. I have no affinity for the notion in itself, the way it makes the intelligentsia foolish and fools more pronounced. No, neither do I care much for the notion of intimate companionship, bar what I had with Mary, the divesting of so much trust and emotion. No, certainly not. What interests me about it most is that it can be turned on and off, snuffed out like a candle, just like that.

When Mary confronted Dermot that night, she was almost unrecognisable to me. Her face, so cold, seemed as though it were cut straight from a sculpture of ice. She told him what she knew, told him he was no longer welcome in the house and told him that she would give him a 24 hour head start before she called the police. The money she cared not about, it was the duplicity that wounded her oh so gravely. Without a word or a kiss, Dermot walked out of the living room, with a surprising measure of calm, like a man in a dream, put on his hat and was never seen in the Hartigan household or Drogheda again.

She cried then. But, alas, she chose the wrong time, for it was one of those days where you swore you'd give up the drink, and you managed to hold to your word for a day or so. But you don't like weakness, do you? So when you saw her crying, you didn't comfort her, didn't even ask her why, just slapped her once across the face and told her to stop.

Mary was a good girl, father. She never cried again.

And so there it is, her life story, as pitiful as it is, except for the end. We remained in the house for another year in a strange sense of purgatory. It was no longer hell, for John had found himself a wife. It was no longer heaven either, for the illusions Dermot had woven were gone, leaving nothing but silence in their place. It was like we were waiting for something, waiting quietly and patiently, but for what neither of us could ascertain.

You went missing a lot that year, father, and the house was improved. Often you derided the family, telling us how we shamed you, and that we weren't fit to call ourselves Hartigans. We were pond scum, even John. But one day, Boxing Day in fact, after you'd killed mother and left the house, Mary came to me in the night, and said, "Why don't we leave?" And so we did, as coincidences go, on the day which John died. And then, sadly, Mary breathed her last, but she was happy for that last breath was not in that house of horrors.

Now, if you have any sense about you, and I don't discredit you entirely, you are probably wondering just who on Earth I am. Because you only ever had one daughter, my blessed Mary. So that should raise questions in your mind.

As I said, on the voyage Mary died. What I neglected to tell you was that she was reborn. She breathes in different form to the one you knew, and though our continence may be the same, she and I are very different people, and you shall never see your daughter again. I've adopted a new name, one you will no doubt find suitably ironic once I reveal the final twist in this dramatic tale. My name is Mercy, Mercy Hartigan.

And no, that is not the final twist. I thought that you might like to know that what remains to you of your world will not be yours much longer. Because before I left, I wrote a letter to the coroner, and left it to my solicitor to deliver at a certain date, which by now has come to pass. Within, I have chronicled extensive and inadmissible evidence about how you murdered my mother, and when he corroborates it, you can say goodbye to the life you know forever.

For it is rather suspicious, don't you think, that four members of the same family should die in the same year, especially as the patriarch of the family is conspicuously there at every single event, unharmed, unscathed or untouched? Very conspicuous indeed.

Now, just one last thing. As you sit in gaol, probably in a dank, depressing cell awaiting your judgement in a year or two, I wish to thank you for one thing. Thank you ever so much for allowing me an education, so I could write this letter to you personally. It wouldn't have had the same feel if it had been composed by a clerk or a scribe, would it? And without you, father, none of this could've been made possible.

Many happy returns,

Mercy Hartigan

England, 13th September, 1838


End file.
